


Voll und Warm in the Dark

by VoluptuousPanic



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Berlin (City), Catholic Guilt, F/M, Goethe - Freeform, It'll End in Tears - Freeform, No Warnings But Potentially Active Triggers, PTSD, Plot? What Plot?, Possible Schmoop, Religious Guilt, Sexy Eye Bags, Survivor Guilt, Toward Building a Fic Canon, WW1, Was Guilt Mentioned? Because Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 08:49:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20132689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoluptuousPanic/pseuds/VoluptuousPanic
Summary: Sin no longer kept him awake at night. Goethe would if he could unsee the things he’d seen. Even God couldn’t take those things away.Another plot free deep dive vignette, in which Charlotte is Charlotte, Gereon is the small spoon and brings the angst while telling some secrets, and Anno brings the triggers (surprise!not).





	Voll und Warm in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Still playing with a set of ideas for the sake of character study wankery, mostly mine, a few cribbed from others. Some revisions on prior details, but not worth the effort of fixes. 
> 
> Going dark, going bleak, jumping in the deep end born of a wanky question thrown into a Tumblr DM. This is very much show canon Gereon. Book canon Gereon would never be this raw.
> 
> Also past tense passive voice triggers. Sorry, not sorry.

“They’re seventeen and idle, Gereon. Leave them be tonight. What were you like at that age? I’m sure you were a terror, no, I’m sure you most certainly weren’t a terror, but you were probably idle. Come back to bed.” 

He turned away from the window to look at Charlotte, who lay like an odalisque in the open bed, coyly covering breasts with an arm, her legs crossed and the bedclothes arranged just so, so that her performance was as intriguing as it was preposterous. Beer soaked SA youth wilding through Kreuzberg could wait for tomorrow and would likely meet their comeuppance before then without police assistance. He laughed at the futility and watched Charlotte grin. She smirked cheekily, then shook her head with a yawn and held the sheet and eiderdown back for him. She seemed as tired as he, and he was tired enough not to be troubled that sleeping together and kisses in passing were the only intimacies they’d been afforded in several days. At least tonight they were naked. 

Gereon switched off the lamp and returned to bed, sliding between the sheets to the heat and scent of Charlotte’s skin. He pressed against her, exhaling in pleasure as she stroked him, relieving the tautness of his nipples and the gooseflesh that had risen on his arms while he stood at the window. She pulled the bedclothes up to their necks against the chill of the room. He folded in on himself and turned his back to Charlotte to push into her embrace and closed his eyes again when her body curled around his. She kissed the back of his neck and settled her head next to his, her leg hitched over his hip, but the way her fingertips lazily traced from his elbow to his ribs along the back of his arm and through the hair at his armpit told him an answer to her question was still expected. The way Charlotte could touch him… He let the sensation soothe him and answered. 

“When I was seventeen I was at seminary,” he said softly, almost into the pillow, confessing to Charlotte the secret that he’d never explicitly told anyone. For months they’d shared a bed and a bathroom, and he’d never told even her. Charlotte held his other secrets and might as well carry that one too. The people in Köln who knew, knew, but likely didn’t remember: family, family friends, a few of his father’s colleagues, but it was all lost in the shuffle with the war, with what he didn’t remember until he did, with Anno’s absence. They were the same people who knew that Gereon had gone to the trenches, been held by the French, and come back broken and fearful. And that later he would become a decorated Kriminalkommissar, of desirable standing fitting with that of his family, and that he didn’t seem interested entertaining marriage to any of their daughters. Some would whisper about Helga; some would whisper that Gereon was like Severin. Seminary was simply something that was, something that had happened in the past and was forgotten. Gereon’s semi-cloistered education in theology and canon law now offered him little but a strong, yet faulty moral compass, and a forté for meticulous case research, as well as occasional solace and a resilient and intricate framework for guilt in many permutations. In the army, in the police, having almost become a priest was information omitted. In France, he was grateful that Anno mostly spared him ridicule for it. For a moment, he doubted that even Helga remembered, but with examination, he felt the sting of having had it thrown at him. In the Berlin Kripo, it was irrelevant. 

“You were going to be a—“ Gereon could hear Charlotte’s disbelief. Her incredulity at faith. His own wavered increasingly, most acutely from regular indulgence in the sin of adultery as well as a host of others, chiefly gluttony and avarice. But then his faith had always wavered since another seminarian had passed him a slim edition of Goethe’s _Venetian Epigrams_ where he’d first learned the variety of what people did to one another in bed independent of schoolboys’ tales and Anno’s boasts. In Vice the trade was in inventive pornography; in Homicide, photos of lustmord. He still preferred Goethe, but would reserve that secret for the time being. Sin no longer kept him awake at night. Goethe would if he could unsee the things he’d seen. Even God couldn’t take those things away. 

Gereon took Charlotte’s hand, threading his fingers between hers against his belly to draw her arm across his side. “A priest. It was expected of the youngest, and what my mother wanted.” Though out of keeping with the time, it was a matter of fact for his mother’s family, and it was her pedigree that bolstered Engelbert Rath’s designs on political dynasty. Circumstances of birth order, class, social standing, Köln. “It was always assumed. Anno would go to university to be a doctor. Severin would follow Father. A lot of good that plan did for either of them. Ursula would, and did, continue to climb, marrying above our station. And the youngest son would enter the clergy.” Seminary hadn’t been so bad. It was quiet, the expectations were clear. It was the last time Gereon remembered having no doubts about his place in the world. Ironic, given that faith was the domain of doubt, and doubt the subject of discourse. By grace he didn’t encounter priests who abused their position, but he was there little more than a year, longer even than he was in France.

“What happened, Saint Gereon?” Charlotte teased, though it was gentle. She pressed a kiss behind his ear. Of the long list of qualities he most loved about Charlotte, her tender humor with regard to gravity of memory or situation was what benefitted him most often. The indignities of their own histories and circumstances could be no more different, but he was beginning to see the merits of simply letting go of horrors that no longer served any purpose rather than hiding them away where they could escape without warning. Charlotte had incited him to live in the present. His present, what didn’t belong to morphine or Ernst Gennat or Günther Wendt or the Armenian, was hers. His past remained Anno’s. 

“A small matter of war.” He laughed bitterly. “When Anno was called to serve, I was called home. Father came to Bonn without notice, without a driver. Severin had already gone and no other son of my father’s would hide from the front.”

“So you went.” Charlotte said gently. 

Gereon nodded. “I was posted in Köln in the offices, then sent to France to Anno’s regiment.” His voice went soft. “Father tried to see a man made of me before the front. She was a beautiful girl, but I couldn’t.” He wondered now why he hadn’t thought of Goethe then, but all that was on his mind at the time was that he wanted his first to be Helga. Helga, who was Severin’s age but had once promised herself to Gereon, but who had eagerly accepted Anno’s proposal and married without reservation, and was already heavily pregnant with Anno’s child when they wed. Gereon’s father knew enough to choose a girl who was like Helga, pretty, cheerful, empathetic, older…facile. She wasn’t Helga and he recoiled from her. Blessedly that day was the only time his father called him a faggot. 

“So when did you…? It hasn’t seemed important.” Gereon could hear that Charlotte felt she should have asked, but she needn’t have. He understood why she didn’t. The whens and wheres of men’s first times weren’t important, because they weren’t judged for them. He knew of Charlotte’s, because she’d told him without shame, that she’d been thirteen and that it had been enviably normal and natural, a moment shared between two school friends on the grass in the Tiergarten. For her it was equally normal and natural to be enterprising enough to begin accepting money in exchange for a performance of the same. When she’d told him, he’d laughed and found himself saying _Kommst, Grashüpfer_ and pulling her into his lap. Of course, she’d also told him about things that had happened to her that made him a sick kind of angry that was new to him. 

Now Gereon’s voice came as softly as moments before. “A Silesian girl at a field brothel at the front in France. Anno and other officers took up a collection and asked for a pretty girl who...who hadn’t been…too used yet.” He laughed, unhappily, ashamed, feeling a tightness inside his chest and in his face that usually heralded tremors. He concentrated instead on the shape of Charlotte’s body against his. “I begged Anno not to stay to make sure the deed was done. I suppose that Father told him what happened before. Half the regiment came down with VD. I didn’t. Anno did.” 

Why Vice existed to police the livelihood of women who had no other income, when it was clear to Gereon’s elementary understanding of disease that women were merely the vectors for men give each other the clap, boggled the mind. In the trenches, he’d seen it happening without women as vectors. Anno had, at least, protected him from that, but Gereon sometimes wondered if his lot had been better if he’d exchanged himself for the protection of another soldier against Anno. Possible clap and silver nitrate be damned. Gereon had rebuffed more than one gentle and unfailingly kind offer from other soldiers who were bigger and hardier if no older and just as frightened as he. He’d even been kissed by one with whom he’d curled together to sleep. He had considered it as an arrangement, but he wasn’t like Severin. Someday he would confess those particulars to Charlotte too. 

“Oh, Gereon.“ Charlotte’s voice broke. She smoothed his hair. “Did they pay her enough to treat you well at least?” He knew that she was asking as much after the girl as after him. 

Gereon nodded agreement into the pillow. Charlotte’s arm tightened around him and he felt the warmth of her breath at the place where neck turned to shoulder. He closed his eyes tighter, with effort, willing his memories to become something that just was, like seminary. For everything that came before Berlin to become something that just was, something that happened in the past. He supposed it would come to be eventually, that he could put everything away in the boxes and cartons in his head that contained the war and family and Anno. That Helga and Moritz would someday be there. And Bruno. And Stephan Jänicke and the women from Kreuzberg. And every shot he ever fired into the haze of fog and smoke and gas. 

_The smell of beer and soldiers and cheap perfume and sweat. The girl was lush and soft and blonde and gentle with a peasant’s open face. Anno’s voice: “You don’t need one liebling. He’s a virgin. Fresh as a little girl. He’s got nothing to give you but that.” Laughter. “We can hold him down if he’s too much for you.” Gereon was so drunk he could barely stand, but managed to get himself unbuttoned. Arguing further with Anno was pointless and his cock was painfully hard. “Mund oder Muschi?” she asked. “We’ve paid, give him everything!” someone shouted. Gereon knew then why Anno had barked at him to wash. The girl patted his cheek and kissed the tip of his nose. “Alles wird gut, kleiner Soldat,” she said, then was on her knees, opening his shirt and yanking his uniform kit down around his ankles. He’d never felt anything like the heat of her mouth, the motion of her tongue. She made him wait. Then he was between her legs with the slippery heat of her body enveloping him. The vulgar slap of flesh, seven seconds by the officers’ count and he was there, shaking and unsteady and heavy over her on the table as sensation rolled through his body. Cheers. “You did fine, mein kleiner Schatz,” the girl whispered in his ear as she helped him upright again. “You’ll be ready for your girl once you have one.” She kissed his mouth and his forehead and ruffled his hair before she righted his undergarments and refastened his trousers over his wet cock. Anno, grinning with solicitous pride, wrestled him into a nelson hold and poured schnapps into his mouth as a chorus of soldiers began singing “Zum Geburtstag viel Glück.” It was his nineteenth birthday. Gereon left the tent to rowdy whoops and slaps on the back. Outside in the cold where the red lantern blazed for officers only, he retched, finding he was full of nothing but alcohol, then stumbled back to camp alone. In the morning, the girl’s stocking garter, a frayed red grosgrain ribbon, was on his rifle._

After that, until Berlin, there was only Helga. Helga who still believed Anno had hung the moon. 

“Men are animals,” Gereon whispered and turned in Charlotte’s arms. He settled with a deep sigh, his face between Charlotte’s breasts, limbs entangled with hers. Under the scent of Nivea and musky flush of the perfume that made him sneeze before it dried was the sweet, salty warmth of her skin. He nosed the underside of a breast and stroked his open palm over the curve of her backside and was thankful his cock didn’t rise. He wanted just to touch. His feelings were too raw for more, and Charlotte had known from the first that tenderness and touch were a better salve than sex when he thought of war.

“We’re all animals, Gereon,” she whispered back, her breath warm in his hair. “With infinite capacity for good and evil, love and hate.” She kissed the top of his head, and with a fingertip traced the shell of his ear and the frame of his jaw. She stroked his neck and his shoulder and down the length of his back. “Mostly,” she said, “I think that men’s desires are simple. Most already know what they want whether they say it or not. In bed, at work, on the street, at the polls. Good or evil. Men are easy.”

“And am I easy?” Gereon asked. 

“Easy to please? Or easy to love?” she asked, folding her body more tightly around his. “Those are two very different questions.”

When Gereon first began sleeping with Charlotte regularly, which in many respects was more intimate than fucking, Charlotte explained to him that there was a difference between a man being the best lover a woman had ever known and a man being her favorite lover, and that rarely were those men the same. At the time of the discussion, and in the face of her experience and his lack thereof, he doubted his skill. What he came to know in a short time was that listening to her and responding to direction mattered more. 

_Charlotte had led him see his body, made him accept it, made him enjoy it as his own. There was the night she stood behind him at the round mirror of the cluttered vanity in her room at Spenerstraße and undressed him slowly, not allowing him to look away as she removed his waistcoat and tie, shirt, trousers, underthings. “What you seem to want most is to feel loved,” she said “exactly as you are in that moment. And you are many men in many moments. I like that. I like many things about you. I want to show you the ones you can see.” He watched his reflection, blushing crimson as Charlotte stood to tiptoe to kiss his neck, curled her arms from behind to stroke his chest and arms, the length of thigh from knee to hip, the shapes of the bones of his shoulders and ribs and hips, the scars on his shoulder and arm, the fuzz on his chest and the hair below. She made him look at his cock that had risen so stiffly it lay against his belly, and at the way he breathed open-mouthed and heavy eyed when she took his hand and made him grip it to please himself. She called him beautiful and stroked his skin as he brought himself off without shame for the first time in his life. “Love yourself when you do this, Gereon. If we can’t take care and give ourselves pleasure, then we have nothing.” When it was over and he was collapsing into her arms, both their hands wet and working together as he struggled through the last shudders, he opened his eyes to see he wore an expression of sated elation that he knew only on Charlotte’s face. He looked ridiculous and human and real. _

Gereon thought for a moment. Whether Charlotte’s questions required an answer, or whether they implied he knew the answer himself. He let his head still under the Charlotte’s slow touches that traveled the length of his spine. He felt like a cat being stroked, or a child. He wasn’t entirely sure that either he or Charlotte were awake. He thought of Goethe and God, of Köln and France, of Anno and Helga. Of the realization that Berlin and the Castle could have been as ordered, methodical, and fulfilling as seminary if he hadn’t made such a mess of everything by continuing to do what others wanted: his father, Bruno, Anno. He woke suddenly with a start and found himself sitting upright in bed. He turned on the bedside lamp and raked his hand through his hair. “Lotte. Do you?” he asked. He looked at her. 

Charlotte squinted at the lamplight and made a face, but seemed unalarmed. Indeed, she was understanding of his frequent sleep disturbances, and he was thankful that when it occurred, she easily slept through the worst. “Do I what?” she asked, already moving close to take the sheet and counterpane and yank them up again to cover their bodies. She patted his belly, then gently pressed him back to the pillows to lie flat again and insinuated herself against his side before reaching across him to the lamp. 

“Do you love me?” Gereon asked when it was dark again.

Charlotte exhaled a laugh. He knew the sound and the grin that would steal across her face. His arms came around her as she rose on an elbow to look down on him in the dark. Her eyes glittered and he followed the shape of her shoulder with his hand. 

“I’m as disinclined to answer that as you would be if I asked the same. For the same reasons,” Charlotte said, her voice sweet and low, the words chosen carefully. With her fingertip she drew a heart on his chest. The shape seared his sternum and he half expected that he would see it the following morning as a red weal. Charlotte kissed the heart, kissed each nipple, then rested her chin on her folded hands that she stacked on his chest, looking straight up into his eyes as best she could without light. “It’s a secret,” she whispered. 

Gereon nodded and leaned to kiss Charlotte’s forehead. It was enough. As close an admission as either of them could offer presently. He loved Charlotte dearly, so intently that the thought of losing her was like having his heart torn out. If it ended, he’d make do. He knew how to live with a void inside, and how to fill it to stop living should the need arise. He was not easy to love, he knew. Neither was Charlotte. Yet he did, more fiercely than he’d ever loved anyone.


End file.
